Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy

Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy
Gregory, Paul
2004-10-18 00:00:00
The Review of Austrian Economics, 15:1, 95–102, 2002. c 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Book Reviews Peter Boettke, Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. This book is a collection of previously published essays by Peter Boettke on three themes: The contributions of Hayek and Mises to the economic theory of socialism; the economics of Soviet-type dictatorships, and the political economy of Russian transition. Boettke’s contributions to these three issues are thought provoking, and, if accepted, would require considerable rethinking of the way we view the Soviet planned economy and Russian transformation. As someone who considered himself reasonably versed on the “socialist controversy” —having been brought up on Hayek and Mises’s most famous essays and on Abram Bergson’s Journal of Political Economy essay—I confess that I had missed the extreme subtlety, particularly of Hayek’s critique of socialism. Boettke argues (Essay 3) that the socialist controversy has been wrongly interpreted as being about whether socialism, in perhaps its market variant, could achieve something approximating equilibrium prices for the purpose of rational calculation. Boettke explains that Hayek was not particularly inter- ested in equilibrium prices; rather capitalism’s true superiority
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Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy

Abstract

The Review of Austrian Economics, 15:1, 95–102, 2002. c 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Book Reviews Peter Boettke, Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. This book is a collection of previously published essays by Peter Boettke on three themes: The contributions of Hayek and Mises to the economic theory of socialism; the economics of Soviet-type dictatorships, and the political economy of Russian transition. Boettke’s contributions to these three issues are thought provoking, and, if accepted, would require considerable rethinking of the way we view the Soviet planned economy and Russian transformation. As someone who considered himself reasonably versed on the “socialist controversy” —having been brought up on Hayek and Mises’s most famous essays and on Abram Bergson’s Journal of Political Economy essay—I confess that I had missed the extreme subtlety, particularly of Hayek’s critique of socialism. Boettke argues (Essay 3) that the socialist controversy has been wrongly interpreted as being about whether socialism, in perhaps its market variant, could achieve something approximating equilibrium prices for the purpose of rational calculation. Boettke explains that Hayek was not particularly inter- ested in equilibrium prices; rather capitalism’s true superiority